Root Cause Approach to Autoimmunity with Dr. Gary Kaplan: Rational Wellness Podcast 265
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Dr. Gary Kaplan discusses a Root Cause Approach to Autoimmunity with Dr. Ben Weitz.
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Podcast Highlights
1:32 Dr. Kaplan went to Osteopathic College and he ended up on the Board of the American Holistic Medical Association and he was mentored by Dr. Norm Shealy, who was a neurosurgeon who worked with patients with chronic pain and he developed the TENS unit. Dr. Kaplan got involved with treating pain and he also got trained in acupuncture. At the end of the ’90s the American Academy of Pain Medicine advocated treating chronic pain with opioids and he adopted this approach as well. As we know, using opioids for pain turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. His patients kept flipping back and forth between pain and depression and they discovered that both of these were due to inflammation in the central nervous system. They discovered that these patients had infections that led to the immune system attacking the brain via cross reactivity, which is autoimmune encephalopathy.
8:07 Chronic Lyme and other infections. About 20% of those people with Lyme disease develop chronic Lyme and a percentage of those with strep infection develop PANDAS and a percentage of those with Epstein-Barr will develop chronic fatigue. With Lyme it is really tick-borne diseases, since many of these patients also develop the co-infections, such as Bartonella, Babesia, Ehrlichia, and Anaplasma. One of the issues with diagnosing Lyme is that many of the conventional testing, like the Western blot test done by LabCorp or Quest is not very accurate. Sometimes doctors will treat the Lyme for two weeks and patients improve and they think it is gone and it’s not. Another reason for the persistence of Lyme infections is that doctors often fail to look for the coinfections, so they eradicate the Lyme but not the co-infections, these other tick-borne infections. This is the most common reason for chronic infection, which is the persistence of the bug in the system. The other reason for chronic infection is that the bug breaks the immune system, which is what happens with long COVID. The spike protein damages the non-classical monocytes so that they continue to spew out inflammatory chemicals called cytokines. This is based on the work of Dr. Bruce Patterson (Incell Diagnostics) who has conducted research and has identified the cytokine pattern that can be measured with a blood test. Dr. Patterson has been involved in some of this research. Then Long Haul COVID can be treated with a series of medications, including Selzentry (Maraviroc), which is an HIV medication and may be a good anti-aging drug, along with Pravachol (Pravastatin), Ivermectin, and Aspirin.
Dr. Gary Kaplan is the founder and medical director of the Kaplan Center for Integrative Medicine, and author of Total Recovery: A Revolutionary New Approach to Breaking the Cycle of Pain and Depression. A pioneer and leader in the field of integrative medicine, Dr. Kaplan has studied and practiced Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine, Emergency Medicine and Herbal Medicine. Dr. Kaplan is passionate about using multidisciplinary and alternative medicine strategies to address underlying chronic conditions and his office is The Kaplan Center for Integrative Medicine in Maclean, Virginia. His new book, Why You Are Still Sick, has just been released.
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional Nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss and also athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111. Dr. Weitz is also available for video or phone consultations.
Podcast Transcript
Dr. Weitz: Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates, and to learn more, check out my website, drweitz.com. Thanks for joining me and let’s jump into the podcast. Hello, Rational Wellness Podcasters. Thank you so much for joining me again today.
Today, our topic is we want to learn about how to approach autoimmune diseases from a root cause with Dr. Gary Kaplan. Dr. Gary Kaplan is the founder and medical director of the Kaplan Center for Integrative Medicine. He’s the author of Total Recovery: A Revolutionary New Approach to Breaking the Cycle of Pain and Depression. He is a pioneer and a leader in the field of integrative medicine. Dr. Kaplan has studied and practiced osteopathic manipulative medicine, emergency medicine, and herbal medicine. Dr. Kaplan is passionate about using multidisciplinary and alternative medicine strategies to address underlying chronic conditions. And Dr. Kaplan’s new book, Why You Are Still Sick, has just been released Dr. Kaplan, thank you so much for joining me.
Dr. Kaplan: Thanks very much for having me on the program.
Dr. Weitz: So how did you first get interested in integrative medicine and functional medicine?
Dr. Kaplan: Oh, that’s a long story. Actually, when I first got out of osteopathic school, I ended up on the Board of the American Holistic Medical Association many years ago. And I had the privilege of training with some of the pioneers in the field in what was then called holistic, which evolved into complementary and alternative medicine. And so, Norm Shealy was one of my mentors. Norm was the guy who invented the dorsal column stimulator and the TENS unit for treatment of chronic pain. He’s a neurosurgeon. But Norm went native in the early ’80s and started doing behavioral medical approaches for the treatment of chronic pain. So, I studied with Norm and wanted to replicate a lot of the work he was doing.
And so, I’ve been involved in the integrated medicine field from the beginning in my own career and the privilege of studying with people like Norm Shealy and Joe Helms in acupuncture and trained as an acupuncturist as well. And then I came here to Georgetown to do my family medicine residency and also got boarded in pain medicine as well. So, this has been an evolutionary process, but I’ve always been focused on people struggling with chronic pain and chronic illness throughout my career. And I’ve had some really outstanding teachers as I’ve gone along the process. As the book will talk about, one of the other things I’ve become expert at is attributed to chronic Lyme. So, we look at a lot of different infections. And let me back up one more step, because it’s worth talking about what happened with the first book. At the end of the ’90s, American Academy of Pain Medicine said, “We can start treating chronic pain problems with opioids, right?” We got benign pain problems.
Dr. Weitz: What could go wrong with that?
Dr. Kaplan: Jesus. Yes, what could go wrong with that? And it turned into, as we now know, an unmitigated disaster, but what happened was I came back from that meeting and started using opioids, right? I’m a good Gooby. And my patients were flipping back and forth between pain and depression and it was driving me crazy. I’m going, “Okay, this doesn’t make any sense. Why do we see so much correlation between pain and depression?” And I put together a study group of a colleague of mine from NIH, colleagues of mine from Georgetown, and said, “Okay, guys, what is this?” Because none of us knew. And in the process of studying this stuff and working together, what we found was that really both of these conditions were about inflammation in the central nervous system. And so, the question was, “Okay, what’s inflammation?”, because everybody talks about inflammation, right? And inflammation is a lot of different things in the body. So, in the case of the first book, we were looking at the innate immune system that is the first responder guys. And their job is, you get an infection, you get damage to cells that they rush in. They clean it up and they leave hopefully. If they don’t leave, they keep doing damage. So, think in terms of you remodeling your house and you’ve decided that you’ve had water damage in your living room and so you need the guys to come in and tear up the floorboards and take down several walls and get in there and set everything up.
So, the general contractor can come in and fix your living room, but these guys look at your dining room and say, “Oh, that needs to be fixed.” So, they start tearing that up and then they look at your kitchen and they go, “Oh, we can tear that up.” And they start tearing up your whole house. Well, it’s a really bad thing if instead of your house, this is your brain they’re working on. And so, now what’s happening is you’ve got this inflammatory process going on mediated by these special cells in the central nervous system called microglia. So, that’s where things started. We were working with that for a number of years, but clearly, we were missing things and it wasn’t enough. And so, then we started looking at the acquired side of the immune system and why it was that we were seeing a number, especially in our line patients, of what’s called PANS and PANDAS. It’s Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome in patients. We were looking at these people who had an infection and then got really sick. And it wasn’t just enough to look at the innate side. We had to look at the acquired side. Well, the acquired side is your antibodies. Okay. So, why were these antibodies being activated? Well, they’re supposed to be activated to kill off the bugs, but damage was occurring to the system such that they were getting confused between the bugs and your brain. So, now what’s happening is you’re attacking yourself. So, a process which started off appropriately attacking the bug was now attacking your brain again. So, now, you got two things going on. You got the innate immune system, the microglia doing their thing, attacking your brain. And you have the acquired immune system now attacking your brain. That’s inflammation. And now, we call this an autoimmune encephalopathy. That is where the body that your own immune system has started to attack your brain. That’s a result of being first set off by infections and then getting confused.
Dr. Weitz: So, you go into some of the mechanisms in your book for how infections lead to autoimmunity. And you mentioned cross reactivity, which a lot of us talk about, but you also mentioned epigenetics and microbial persistence and bystander activation. Perhaps you could explain what those are and how this works.
Dr. Kaplan: Absolutely. And this is where functional and conventional medicine merge and need to really get clear that this is about the best possible medicine. Okay? So, you have to think of this, only 20% of people who get Lyme disease develop chronic Lyme. Okay. Not every kid who gets a strep infection develops PANDAS. Not everybody who gets Epstein-Barr develops chronic fatigue syndrome. What’s different about this crew? So, that we started looking at. One of the things is genetics, but that’s an evolving field and we’re just beginning.
Dr. Weitz: Maybe before you go further, maybe you can even explain what chronic Lyme or chronic infection is, because somebody say gets Lyme disease. They get bit by a tick. They have this infection. Maybe you take your antibiotics for a few weeks and sometimes it seems like it’s gone away, but then this chronic often called stealth infection ends up occurring.
Dr. Kaplan: So, it’s an excellent question and I don’t want to get ahead of myself. So, in the case of Lyme disease, we really are talking about tickborne diseases. Okay? So, there’s a percentage of people who first off don’t even know they’ve been bit by a tick, end up with Lyme disease and it sits in the system undiagnosed.
Dr. Weitz: In fact, a lot of people, right?
Dr. Kaplan: Unfortunately, very high percentage of people. And then it sits in the system until potentially years later when they don’t know why they’ve been sick, because nobody bothered to ask, right? The basic rule of thumb is if all your lab results are normal and you’re still sick, we didn’t ask the right question. So, that means we’ve got to look further. And unfortunately, the basic rule is, “Well, your lab results are fine. Go away.” Real failure of the part of the medical profession. So, now what has to happen is we have to back up and say, “Okay, why are you still-“
Dr. Weitz: And by the way, part of that has to do with insurance, because if the insurance is only going to cover a CBC and a chem screen and a couple of other things, the patient thinks all the labs are run. So, everything’s fine. There’s nothing else that you could actually even run.
Dr. Kaplan: You’re absolutely correct. And the other part of the problem is the docs themselves don’t even know how accurate or inaccurate some of their testing is. So, the Western blood testing done for Lyme disease by LabCorp or Quest actually is about as accurate as flipping a coin. It’s a fairly insensitive test and it leaves people being told they don’t have the disease when in fact they do have. So, that’s one massive problem. So, you’ve got to know how good your labs are in order to do it. So, when we talk about tick-borne diseases, we’re talking about Lyme disease, but we’re also talking about Bartonella. So, Borrelia burgdorferi and there’s subcategories of Borrelia burgdorferi subspecies. Miyamoto is much more common on the West Coast than it is on the East Coast. All right. So, you’ve got to know which species to be looking for in addition to the bug itself. But then there’s Bartonella, which gets carried in Lyme. There’s Ehrlichia and Anaplasma. And so, you’ve got to be looking for these different diseases because sometimes it’s not just Lyme disease, but rather it’s these other tickborne diseases that are also at play.
Dr. Weitz: These are often referred to as Lyme coinfections.
Dr. Kaplan: Absolutely. That’s exactly correct. These are called Lyme coinfections and it is one of the reasons that we see “persistence” of Lyme disease, because they failed to look for the other infections or failed to eradicate the other infections. But there’s another percentage of people whose Lyme has become chronic again. And it’s deep in the tissues and it’s particularly hard to get to. And that 20% of people can be very sick and very disabled. And so, if you inadequately treat the Lyme, meaning if you treat it for two weeks, call it a day, you may not have killed it all and you may have set somebody up for chronic Lyme. If you have other things going on that you miss that the immune system is weakened, you may have people going on to chronic Lyme, which gets into this whole epigenetic stuff you had asked about. So, chronic infection is about persistence of the bug in the system. Not always. Sometimes it’s about the bug breaking the immune system and it’s the immune system, which has now become the problem, even though you’ve eradicated the bug. If we jump for a second to something like COVID, what we think has happened in COVID is… Well, we know what happens. … the virus comes in, the virus goes away, but people stay sick. Somewhere between 10 to 35% of people who get COVID stay sick, long haul or chronic COVID. Why is that? It’s because the immune system broke.
Okay. So, the bug came in, the bug broke the immune system, and now you have persistence of the infection. Now, you have persistence of symptoms, even though the infection itself is no longer there. In the case of COVID, one of the things we believe has happened is there’s a particular type of white cell, part of the innate immune system, called the non-classical monocyte. We think what may have happened is the spike protein may have damaged that cell and then it does two things, which is very interesting. One thing it does is it keeps spewing out inflammatory chemicals, cytokines. Cytokines are the proteins that actually do the work of inflammation. They blow things up, they penetrate things, kill them off.
Dr. Weitz: What is the name of that cell one more time?
Dr. Kaplan: A non-classical monocyte.
Dr. Weitz: Non-classical monocyte.
Dr. Kaplan: That’s one of three subtypes of monocytes, white cells. So, what happens is the spike protein has damaged it such that it keeps spewing out all of these inflammatory chemicals, chemicals that are meant to blow things up, destroy things, do the job of protecting us, but now they’re overdoing it, but it does another very sneaky thing. Monocytes are only supposed to live for five to seven days and then this go away and that should be the end of it. But in the case of the spike protein damage, it screws around with a normal cell cycle. So, as opposed to the cell dying, what it’s supposed to do, it’s a bit of a zombie cell and it keeps spewing out these inflammatory proteins and doesn’t die. So, this is a lot based on the work of Bruce Patterson. His company is Incell Diagnostics. I do not have any financial relationship with him. I have done research with them and I have published papers with them. And what Bruce has done is he’s figured out the chemical pattern, the cytokine pattern specific to this particular cell. So, we can measure that. It’s a blood test. It’s easy. We can measure that and then we can treat that with a series of medications, depending upon what we’re looking at. And so, we’ve had very, very good success at eradicating these chronic long haulers when that’s the only thing wrong with this. So, we can diagnose and we can treat.
Dr. Weitz: So, you’re testing the cytokines, is that right?
Dr. Kaplan: Yes.
Dr. Weitz: And that’s helping to guide some of your testing. Interesting. I started using the Lymphocyte MAP Test that Dr. Vojdani came out with as a way to analyze immune system imbalances after COVID and that seems to be helpful as well.
Dr. Kaplan: And I think you’re looking at essentially the same piece of information just presented differently.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Dr. Kaplan: So whatever works, we’ll take it. Then it should give you a direction in terms of treatment and in the case of post-COVID, we’ve been using Selzentry maraviroc, which was an HIV drug, because it blocks a very specific cytokine receptor. Which interestingly enough, a study just came out suggesting that maraviroc may actually be a nice antiaging drug, because in the process of blocking this particular receptor, the cytokine receptor, it prevents the entrance into the cell of inflammatory proteins. And so, if you can do that, aging is ultimately an inflammatory process bit out of control. If we can stop that, we can slow the aging process, but for the immediate future and this was based on a mouse study. So, we haven’t done this in humans.
But for the immediate future, it’s one of the drugs we can use for post-COVID syndrome. Another drug we can use is Pravachol pravastatin, a statin medication, but again, through its mechanism of action, it can reduce inflammation in the body Ivermectin can also have some role here as can aspirin. And one of the selective serotonin medications can also help reduce problems. So, we balanced it according to what we’re looking at on a cytokine pattern. Another theory about what’s going on with post-COVID syndrome-
Dr. Weitz: Have you used a nutritional approach as well for such patients?
Dr. Kaplan: We balance a little bit of everything. So, yes, we’ll also use supplement and nutritional approaches, but I’ll have to tell you that this set of drugs has been a mainstay and worked magnificently for us. If it doesn’t work for us, it’s because there’s something else going on that we’ve missed. And in those cases, we’ve identified patients who in fact have chronic Lyme. We’ve identified patients who have chronic Epstein-Barr or mono. We’ve identified patients who have had other chronic infections that have been sitting in their system. That when the immune system get weakened, they blossom. And so, there’s a lot of different things we have to do to back up and look at what’s going on. And we’ve also identified people who have toxicity issues, mold. Mold toxins can damage the immune system, can damage the neurologic system, and may set you up for either weakened immune system, which then when you get sick with an infection, it doesn’t respond appropriately or in and of themselves, they can be the problem. So, testing for and evaluating for mold toxins is a very important part of the work we do.
Dr. Weitz: Cool. So, you mentioned Lyme disease. What are some of the other common infections that you see as factors underlying triggers for autoimmune diseases?
Dr. Kaplan: So certainly, in kids with PANDAS specifically, strep, these are kids who get a strep infection. And then what happens is a week, two weeks, three weeks later, they develop obsessive compulsive disorder. They develop this truly bizarre behavioral patterns. They can have regressive behavior where they’re suddenly acting like a three year old again. They can have these pseudo seizures. Pseudo seizures are seizure-like activities, but they don’t show up on an EEG, scares the both Jesus out of the parents. I’ve had kids literally become paralytic. They stop being able to walk for a period of several weeks. Again, full neurologic testing is normal, but they come back and they recover. They go through these cycles of these problems. So, strep is certainly one thing that we see that could create an autoimmune response in the central nervous system. Mycoplasma pneumonia is another type of infection that could create this problem. Influenza can create the problem and COVID can probably create the problem as well. So, there’s a bunch of different infections you have to think about and test for. EBV mono, chronic mono could also be one of these. Chronic mono has been associated in its extreme forms, which forms leukemia, but it’s also been associated with multiple sclerosis, which is a neuroinflammatory disease. So, thing to keep in mind and let’s back up and talk about neuroinflammation, because this is crucial.
Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, multiple sclerosis are all inflammatory diseases. So, in the case of Alzheimer’s, if you have lots of tau and beta tangles in your brain, okay, but you do not have inflammation in your brain, you don’t have Alzheimer’s. If you have tau and beta tangles in the brain and you have inflammation as we can now measure, we can look at the microglia and see whether or not they’re active and you have inflammation, you have Alzheimer’s. So, the focus then of our treatments needs to be in reducing or preventing better the inflammation that occurs.
Dr. Weitz: Right, because Dr. Dale Bredesen and others have shown us that the reason for the tau and the amyloid protein is to protect the brain from inflammation, from infections, from toxins.
Dr. Kaplan: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, that’s one of the things you’re looking at, but the question is, does the microglia then come into play?
Dr. Weitz: And then when they have these drugs that they’ve developed that actually reduce the amyloid and then they don’t work and they don’t understand. We got rid of the amyloid. How come the patient’s not better?
Dr. Kaplan: Because you didn’t fix the inflammation.
Dr. Weitz: Exactly.
Dr. Kaplan: You didn’t fix the damage to the microglia. And the microglia, so now we’re on the innate side, may in fact be hyper reactive appropriately, because if there is an infection that you missed, it’s trying to protect you. So, you’re going to check for that. And sometimes it’s hyper reactive because you’re poisoned either by heavy metals or by mold or by glyphosates. So, that your diet. You asked about nutritional stuff. I mean, one of the biggest problems we’ve had is we have soiled the nest, right? So where do you get mercury toxicity from? Mostly, you can get it from amalgam, certainly, but for the most part, we’re not using those anymore, but you can get it from fish. I had one young lady in here a few weeks ago. She will only eat tuna fish for lunch. It’s all she eat for lunch.
I said, “We need to check her.” And indeed, she has mercury toxicity, because the FDA says pregnant women shouldn’t be any more than two cans of tuna fish a week because of the mercury content. Well, A, how about the rest of us, and B, why should anybody eating this if we know that there’s a mercury content in it? Because any amount of mercury is no good for us. So, we have to pay attention. We’ll see mercury toxicity in people who eat sushi a great deal. You think you’re eating well, but the fact of the matter is we’ve done damage the food supply. So, that’s one problem. The other problem that we see is we see a lot of people with gluten intolerance. So, only about 1% of the people have true celiac diseases.
And let me make a point about celiac before we move on about this autoimmune process. Celiac is an autoimmune disease. Gluten causes your body to secrete antibodies, but those antibodies can attack lots of tissues in your brain in addition to going after the gluten, okay? Wheat, I saw a kid in here very depressed, hospitalized, attempted suicide. Because I’m a neuroinflammatory guy, he wasn’t responding to any of the antidepressant medications. I worked him up and found that he had celiac disease.
Now, celiac disease and 5% of the population who have it will only present with neurologic symptoms. He had no gastrointestinal symptoms, no bloating, no gas or diarrhea. Nothing. What he did have though was depression. And indeed, when we took him off all gluten, when we worked to seal his gut, after years’ time, all fall antidepressants, the depression completely resolved. I’ve seen him over a number of years just as his family doc and he’s been 100% since.
Dr. Weitz: That’s great.
Dr. Kaplan: So, you got to think about it, there are two diagnoses you make, right? Those you think about and those you make. So, if you’re not asking the right questions, you’re not going to get the right answers.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Now, why are such infections often undiagnosed?
Dr. Kaplan: Didn’t do the right testing.
Dr. Weitz: What is the right testing for these chronic infections? So first, we have about Lyme and then about some of these other chronic infections. Is it best to look for the antibodies or is it best to look for the pathogen itself or both?
Dr. Kaplan: Yeah. So, one of the big challenges, especially in Lyme disease, is we can’t look at it, the blood, right? There’s no available testing to do that right now. So, we have to look at the body’s response to it and that’s where we start testing with the Western blot or the immunoblot. And if your immune system is damaged and weakened, which it can be from the bug itself, because Lyme will actually weaken the immune system. You may not see much of a response. And there’s a number of us who argue that Lyme is a clinical diagnosis. So, there’s a Horowitz questionnaire that’s been published and validated.
That is one way to test for whether or not you have, if you score an over 45, high probability of Lyme disease. So, this is just based on symptoms that you have. So, you have to ask the questions or you don’t get the answers. Otherwise, you have to do the research and find out how accurate are your labs. So, the labs that we use and I have again no financial connections with any of these guys, Vibrant Labs is one of the labs we use for looking for Lyme disease and other co-infections. And then IGeneX, a lab out in California is another lab that we use for testing in the immunoblot, which is a much more sensitive test for Lyme disease.
Dr. Weitz: Look at the IGeneX panel though. I think they go to $3,000, so you just wonder how much testing is ideal.
Dr. Kaplan: You’re absolutely correct and it’s not an easy question to answer. The real question is, “How sick are you and if you’re not responding to things and if you’re disabled?” Most of the people I see are pretty disabled. And if you’re disabled, you got to find an answer. Most of the people I see have spent tens of thousands of dollars before I get to see them not getting an answer. So, that if I spend $5,000 on testing, lot of money, make no mistake, but if that’s what it takes to get us the understanding of why you’re sick and what our targets are, so we can appropriately get you better, that’s what we have to do. It’s a massive problem, because insurance won’t pay for a lot of this stuff and the system’s broken.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Yeah. We’ve been using Vibrant America a lot more lately and I’m really happy with their testing, but it’s definitely all out of pocket.
Dr. Kaplan: And they’re a good test.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. So, in addition to infections and food sensitivities, can toxins also be triggers for autoimmune diseases?
Dr. Kaplan: Oh, absolutely. So, let’s go back to celiac disease. Okay. Celiac disease is a true autoimmune disease that is only affecting 1% only. It’s 1% of the population. No big deal. But 6 to 18% of the population has gluten intolerance, my wife being one of them. Now, why is that? I believe and there’s some evidence pointing to the problem is the pesticides or the herbicides we use. In the United States, we do crops which are GMOs, genetically modified. And the reason they’re genetically modified is that we want them resistant to the herbicides and the pesticides so that we can increase crop yield, make more money. Okay, good.
The problem is the plants are resistant but still take up the herbicides and the pesticides. So, now what happens is it ends up sprayed on the plants, increases their yield. It’s taken up into the plant, and in the processing, it doesn’t go away. So, it ends up in your Cheerios in the morning when you go to eat. So, now, it turns out that probably glyphosates, one of the chemicals that gets processed through, are not good for us, herbicides and pesticides.
Dr. Weitz: Shocking that chemicals designed to kill plants are not good for us.
Dr. Kaplan: Who knew? Who knew? So now what happens is I have patients who go to France, inclusive of my life, who can eat their croissants and can eat their baguettes while they’re in France and not have any problems. Why is that? Because they don’t allow GMOs and they don’t allow the herbicides that we use here there. So, their food in that regard is cleaner than ours in doing that. As I said earlier, we’ve soiled the nest. We also have a problem with lead in the water supply in a large number of schools in this country, a large number of water supplies in this country. Not clear on exactly what the number is. It’s certainly about 25%, but it may be as high as 35% of the water supply in this country being contaminated with lead. That’s a problem.
Lead poisoning certainly damages the development of the brain, but in adults, it causes problems with hypertension and also can do some potential brain damage. So, it also weaken your immune system. So, you want to be aware of what potentials exposure you’ve had. We had a massive outbreak of lead poisoning in New Orleans after the Katrina several years later. Why? Because they were taking all these old mansions and they were sandblasting them down in order to rehab them and aerosolizing all of the paint that had been on all those clapboard houses. Oh, that was old paint. That old paint had lead in it.
So, all this lead went up into the air. All the neighborhood was breathing it. Guess what? I have an outbreak of lead poison. So, you have, again, things you need to pay attention to. We have to eat as clean as we can and we’ve got to be attentive to the various poisons and toxins we’re putting into our bodies day in and day out.
Dr. Weitz: Right. So, when you discover that a patient is suffering with chronic Lyme or VCO or Bartonella or Epstein-Barr or HSV or mycoplasma, what’s the best treatment program?
Dr. Kaplan: It’s going to be different for each one. One of the things we do is we back up and say, “Okay, is their mold toxicity reaching the immune system? Are there sleep disorders that are potentially weakening immune system? Is there a history of child abuse?” Because that will set up the immune system to be damaged. About 15% higher risk of developing an autoimmune disease if you’ve suffered child abuse. So, all of these things gets factored into, “What does it take to restore your health totally, not just in part?” As we rule these things out or as we treat these things, then we start focusing on the bugs that we need to treat and each bug needs a different treatment.
So, if you’re treating chronic strep, that may be penicillins or a tonsillectomy in some cases, because we find that there are bugs that have been trapped in tonsils. So, if you’re treating chronic Epstein-Barr, a little trickier. There are some antivirals that may be effective, but otherwise, monolaurin is a supplement that we’ve used very successfully with it. We also use some factors called plasmic factors. So, there are different vitamin and mineral and other supplements that can be used in order to treat these conditions. And then for Lyme itself, there’s two ways to approach Lyme or maybe three ways.
One is series of antibiotics that you can use, but there’s also a number of different herbal approaches that can be used as well. And so, the problem with the herbal approaches is that have not been as well studied and so can’t guarantee you as well as I can with the antibiotics. But if the antibiotics aren’t working, the herbal approaches are a completely legitimate way to go look at things.
Dr. Weitz: And of course, the risk of using antibiotics for a long period of time is the damage to microbiome and other negative effects.
Dr. Kaplan: You’re absolutely correct. And so, as you’re using this stuff, you’ve got to be thoughtful all the way around. So, you’ve got to be thoughtful of what’s happening to the gut microbiome. Meaning you’ve got to protect it from yeast overgrowth. You’ve got to refeed it on a regular basis and it doesn’t hurt to take a look at the gut microbiome before you start to see what’s going on as to whether or not there are specific supplements you want to be giving for probiotics or prebiotics in order to maintain a healthy gut. And then while we’re treating people with this stuff, we’re very careful about diets.
We really want people on a hypoallergenic diet, if you will, which is essentially rice, fish, chicken, fresh foods and vegetables, but we want everything organic. We want everything as clean as possible, because we know, you’re absolutely correct, we’re going to be damaging the gut microbiome with these antibiotics and it’s going to take a while for it to recover once we stop. So, you have to do a holistic program. It’s not just a matter of, “Here, take this antibiotic, go away.”
Dr. Weitz: And in terms of antibiotics, even though you’re trying to stick with evidence based, even though taking doxycycline for two or three weeks after an acute Lyme infection, the long term use of antibiotics really hasn’t been that well studied either. Has it?
Dr. Kaplan: The long term use of antibiotics has not been well studied at all. Okay. So, yeah, we actually don’t know. On the other hand, everything is benefit risk. Everything is weighing, “What’s potential downside? What’s potential upside?” And so, we do know that long term antibiotic treatment over months can be effective in treating chronic Lyme. We do know that Lyme exists in a couple of different forms. As such, we have to treat both the active growing form of the bug and we have to treat the cyst form of the bug that it has and we have to treat the biofilm form of the bug. So, there’s layers of stuff we have to do understanding what the bug, who the bug is, and what it does in order to hide and protect itself.
Dr. Weitz: So how do you treat those different forms?
Dr. Kaplan: So, there’s different antibiotics for treating the fast growing form of the bug, which is you do an intercellular such as doxycycline and you use an extracellular such as maybe a third generation cephalosporin or penicillins can be helpful. You also want to use something like lumbrokinase to break up biofilms and Biocidin is another way to break up biofilms and go after them. So, these are supplements. So, you’re mixing, right? You’re not just doing one thing or another. And then you have to rotate in an antibiotic that will treat the cyst form of the bug. It’s an L form of the bug. Something like [inaudible 00:36:15] are the ones we more commonly use.
Dr. Weitz: I’ve often heard people recommend enzymes and you specifically like lumbrokinase, because there are other enzyme formulas that are marketed specifically for breaking up biofilms.
Dr. Kaplan: There are a number. I think again, it’s our obligation as physicians to look at the data and make decisions as best we can on that data.
Dr. Weitz: So, have you tried different biofilm busting products and found lumbrokinase to be the most effective? Have you compared that say to InterFase Plus or to [inaudible 00:36:57] based biofilm buster?
Dr. Kaplan: InterFase in particular, we’re familiar with and use. Part of the issue is you’ve got to have a lot of tricks in your bag, because somebody may tolerate one and not the other. So, we’ll mix and match according to what we’re doing. So, we start off with the basics and then we shift and move according to the patient. It’s a constant conversation. It’s back and forth.
Dr. Weitz: And typically, when you’re treating a patient say with chronic Lyme, how long a course of treatment do you find is typically necessary? It depends on the person.
Dr. Kaplan: It depends on the person. It’s highly individualized. So, as a rule, I start off saying, “Look, three months of conventional antibiotic treatments and let me see if it herx,” which is when the cells break up and the cytokine action occurs. So, let me see if it herx. If you’re herxing, I’m going to continue doing this. If at the end of say, three months of doing this, you’re 90% better, I may leave you alone. If you’re still sick, then I’ll switch to a persister form such as Dapsone for treatment of chronic Lyme.
Dr. Weitz: For those who don’t know, that’s another anti-
Dr. Kaplan: That was developed originally to treat leprosy. So, that’s for treating what’s called really slow growing bugs. And so, Horowitz has developed a protocol for using Dapsone as part of the treatment. Dapsone is a drug you need to be familiar with if you’re going to treat it, because it’s a drug which will deplete folic acid and create problems with anemia. It’s a drug which can also cause methemoglobinemia, where it interferes with the ability of the red blood cells to carry oxygen around the body. So, you need to use methylene blue in order to be able to… There’s no casual way to do this. I mean, you have to understand your drugs. You have to understand the side effects. You have to understand drug-drug interaction or drug-herb interactions. And then you layer your treatments according to what’s appropriate for the given individual. I got to be completely honest. A lot of this stuff, we’re doing based on small studies or based on what we’ve exchanged in terms of information amongst ourselves in the profession. So, a lot of the things we’re doing are off label and a lot of stuff needs a lot more study and we’re coming up with better treatments all the time.
Dr. Weitz: Would it be fair to say, just as ballpark average, three to six months of treatment or on average a year? What would you say the average?
Dr. Kaplan: So here are your factors. If it’s straight Lyme, maybe just three months and you’ll have it wrapped. If it’s been around for a long time, you’re probably going to be at it for about six months. But if you’ve already got an autoimmune process going on, which we do by testing this lab called the Cunningham Moleculara Lab. All of this stuff is in my book, by the way. I wanted to hand all of this information to people so that some of the testing, they can do on their own. Some of them, they can talk to their physicians about.
Dr. Kaplan: Why you’re still sick is a step by step approach, because there’s only one of me and I want to get this information out to people so that they can get better. As we talked at the beginning of the show, it’s probably about 20 million people in the United States suffering with chronic illness that they don’t need to be suffering with because the diagnosis has been missed and we can do better.
Dr. Weitz: I noticed from reading some of your case history that you sometimes also like to use IVIG to strengthen the immune system in these cases.
Dr. Kaplan: So, you’re absolutely correct. So, we’ve been talking about the bugs, but now we have to about, “How do you fix the immune system?” So, there’s a couple of things you can do to try and fix the immune system on the fly. Use of Metformin, Metformin will help modulate the response of the acquired immune system. And I was originally concerned about Metformin and COVID came along because they don’t want to do anything with the immune system. But it turns out that diabetics who were on Metformin, much higher survival rate, lower complication rate than diabetics who were not on Metformin and then got COVID. So, Metformin is back in the line of action. Metformin may turn out also again to be one of the antiaging medications. So, that’s being studied now for antiaging, because it modulates the immune system.
Dr. Weitz: A lot of people talk about using it for antiaging. My only concern is damage to the mitochondria. So, I know my antiaging program, I choose to use berberine instead.
Dr. Kaplan: So, damage to the mitochondria, that’s a whole another conversation. We’ll come back to that in a sec, because that’s important. The innate immune system needs to be treated also. Treating the innate immune system, low dose naltrexone is my go-to drug. CBD is another drug that can be used also for downregulating microglial activity, quieting it. In some cases, doxycycline can be effective, especially in stroke, because stroke is a classic example where there’s been loss of blood supply to an area. It starts to die off. There’s an over reactivity of the microglia, which causes the stroke to be bigger than you want it to be because of all that damage the microglia itself is doing.
Using doxy will quiet that down. So, treating that piece of it and now we’re going after the acquired immune system. So, we can use things. We can use the cytokine protocol. We just are in the process of publishing paper, looking at using cytokine protocols to treat chronic fatigue syndrome, post-treatment Lyme syndrome, chronic non-responsive depressions. And we’re able to actually see different cytokine patterns in these different conditions. So, we’re using that protocol now as part of our approach.
Dr. Weitz: What is that protocol consist of?
Dr. Kaplan: That gets back to using things like Selzentry and Pravachol. And if we’re using Pravachol again, we know that Pravachol pravastatin is going to create problems with utilization of CoQ10. So, we give you CoQ10. So, again, you’re paying attention to what nutrients medications may deprive you of or interfere with and you want to make sure we’re giving that back in quantities that will prevent those side effects.
Dr. Weitz: Could you use red yeast rice instead of Pravachol?
Dr. Kaplan: Probably is the answer to that question. It just hasn’t been studied, but red rice yeast is a statin. That’s where the statins came from. And so, yes, it’s quite possible that that will work.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. It seems to have fewer side effects than statins too from my experience.
Dr. Kaplan: And from my experience as well. I completely agree with you, but at the moment, we’re going with what we’ve been able to see in the short term studies. So, we’re not sure all statins will work by the way. So, pravastatin is the go-to one at this point. We got to study this stuff. So, that’s what we’re working with. And then if you have a particularly high what’s called an sCDL40 cytokine, it’s a risk of microvasculature blood clots. Using aspirin 81 milligrams is an important piece of what we’re doing with the product.
Dr. Weitz: For its blood thinning effect.
Dr. Kaplan: Yup, yup. That’s exactly correct. The next step up would be IVIG. So, IVIG, it’s intravenous immunoglobin. It can also be given subcutaneously. And what this does is we give you what you make and immunoglobins are the antibodies. Okay. So, now what happens is we give them to you and we tell your system, “It’s okay, you don’t need to keep doing that.” So, your system shuts down. And over time, you stop making the antibodies you don’t want to be making to your brain. And that’s the theory on IVIG and it’s very expensive. There’s only a limited number of circumstances in which we get the insurance companies to pay for it. It’s $13,000 a month. And so, we really want to be certain that’s what we need if that’s the case. I will tell you, I just talked to one of my patients, woman in her 40s. She’s got three kids, married, good life except that she’s been 100% bedbound for several years because of-
Dr. Weitz: Sounds like not much of a life.
Dr. Kaplan: Not much of a life, except that she’s 100% percent now.
Dr. Weitz: Great.
Dr. Kaplan: She’s back up, she’s active, she’s got her life back. And that was through using the IVIG as well as other things we had to do with her.
Dr. Weitz: Have you used any of the nutritional protocols for trying to balance and strengthen the immune system?
Dr. Kaplan: I haven’t, because typically, our problem is not a weakened immune system, but a really hyperreactive immune system and trying to bring it back into balance. And so, we typically need some pretty big guns in order to quiet down and the treatment protocol that’s on the horizon and it’s not so much on the horizon. So, plasmapheresis is an exchange process where we give you brand new plasma and we take out the old one. All right. Typically, you have to be hospitalized for this, and again, very expensive, very hard to get insurance companies to agree to it, but it works brilliantly when it works. There is now a process called apheresis. Apheresis is using a combination of albumin with neural saline.
And again, you do about a half volume exchange with this stuff over the course of a couple of hours. You can do that in the office. And that can be done through PBS blood, as opposed to shuns. And that’s also being looked at the anti-aging community. And so, using apheresis is safer. It looks like it takes out a lot of inflammatory factors in people who use it. We don’t have apheresis in the office yet. I’ve been reading on a study and talking colleagues about it. We’ll probably bring it to the office. Apheresis takes skilled nursing in order to be able to do it as well, but it can be done in the office.
And the anti-aging community is finding that, I’m talking to people, there are reports that their aches and pains go away. Their sleep improves. Their energy improves just on using it from an antiaging perspective. Using it in our population, I would expect that it’ll be the same effect that plasmapheresis is, which is you filter this stuff out. And in fact, we have reports of that, where kids have gone from really severe obsessive compulsive disorder and behavioral disorders to 100% fine three days after the process.
Dr. Weitz: I noticed in your book, you have a section where you talk about dealing with mast cells and you recommend PEA and quercetin.
Dr. Kaplan: No, you’re absolutely correct. So, mass cells is another piece of the immune system of the innate side that gets activated. What you see with mast cells is you get flushing. You can get blood pressure changes, heat intolerance, but you can also get chronic pain. Fibromyalgia has been associated with it. Cutting behavior, psychiatric problems have been associated with mast cell activation syndrome. It’s a tough diagnosis to make in the lab, because you got to catch it at just the right time. So, typically, it’s made clinically. And one of the things you’ll see is people break out in hives or you see dermatographia. You draw a line on their back and it lights up bright red. So, they get a lot of histamine in their system. So, mass cells are the source of histamine in the body when you have an allergic reaction. Okay. But it’s also the source of about 200 other factors, chemicals, including serotonin, bradykinin that can create a havoc in the body. To make it a little more complicated, they can selectively release these things as opposed to all or nothing. So, treatment of mass cells is layered approach. All right. So, the PEA you talked about, PEA is a supplement. Basically, what PEA does is it stabilizes the activity between the mass cells and the microglia. And so, it down regulates both of them. It quiets both of them. It takes a while for that to be effective. PEA needs to be taken a minimum of a month and probably about three months to see the full effect of it.
Luteal is another thing that’s very effective in reducing the activity of the microglia. It will quiet the microglia. And again, that’s a supplement that can be utilized. Otherwise, you’re using antihistamines and there are some products made by some of the nutraceutical companies that will reduce histamine in the system. And so, you can use those. Otherwise, you can use antihistamines. Antihistamines come in four flavors. We only actually have medications for three of them. So, you can use H1 blockers such as Pepcid or Tagamet. You can use H2 blockers, which are the antihistamines, Claritin, Zyrtec, Allegra. It’s a whole bunch of those and we’ll have to layer those. We can use something like cromolyn sodium. Cromolyn sodium stabilizes the mass cell. Cromolyn sodium comes in a liquid form and you can use gastrocrom. So, you can drink that in order to do it. But again, you’re layering and what’s the least amount you can get away with and what’s the most amount that you need. And I just saw a kid today, very severe mass cell activation syndrome, but the reality of the matter is he’s been through a number of good physicians who have not been successful at taming this thing. The reason they haven’t been able to tame it is he’s got chronic Lyme and he’s full CDC positive for Lyme. And they’ve been hesitant to treat the Lyme because of the mass cell. And my argument is now you got to treat the Lyme and the mass cell, because if you don’t treat the Lyme disease, you’re missing the underlying cause of the problem. So, we’re just starting off with him doing this. So, mass cell activation is a big deal and does need to be addressed.
Dr. Weitz: What part can glutathione play in healing?
Dr. Kaplan: Oh, glutathione’s necessary for healing the gut is one. It’s the most abundant I’ve had accident in the central services.
Dr. Weitz: Detoxification?
Dr. Kaplan: Absolutely. Absolutely. We use a lot of glutathione. So, we’ll use it IV as well as using it orally, very important detoxification factor. So, you’re mixing, you’re matching. It’s not one thing. You really have to put together a complete comprehensive. And you had also mentioned about mitochondria and I might as well give that a quick word. There’s a lot going on with regards to the mitochondria. And so, the mitochondria, you can replace NAD. It becomes very important. We can do it both IV and you can use it NAD. There’s a couple of NAD products on the market.
Dr. Weitz: And/or [inaudible 00:52:49]?
Dr. Kaplan: Yes.
Dr. Weitz: One of those over another and what dosage.
Dr. Kaplan: Yeah. It’s not called NAD Plus. It’s called something else. It’s slipping my mind, but 300 milligrams, three times a day is the dose. And it’s an NAD product. So, NAD I think is extremely important. We take our chronic fatigue patients, chronic illness patients. We’ll frequently give them about six to eight grams of NAD IV. Now, you don’t do that all at once. You give it anywhere from 500 to 1,00 milligrams. It has to be running over slow drip. It causes vasodilation. It can cause headaches. It can cause blood pressure changes. And so, you need to monitor them closely while you’re giving them, but you have to fill the tank. Think in terms of you’ve been sick for so long, your tank has depleted. We now have to build this back up. And so, we want to be using the NAD in order to repair or restore to fill your tank back to get those repair. So, that becomes one of the mainstays in terms of mitochondrial repair for us.
Dr. Weitz: Any other nutritional supplements that you often use that can play a role in helping autoimmune patients?
Dr. Kaplan: Yeah. I mean, quercetin becomes very important. And so, using quercetin and vitamin C for that matter are two things that we’ll use. Supplements, we’ll use high dose Myers’ cocktail. So, 20 grams of C, along with B vitamins and magnesium. Magnesium is crucial and many people are very deficient in magnesium, not the least bit unusual. Especially if you’re having headaches and aches and pains, you’re probably deficient in magnesium. And the easiest way to do that, you can certainly do red blood cell magnesium levels, but serum magnesium levels are worthless, but again, you have to know what tests to do and how to interpret it. But the easy thing to do is take magnesium. You can take magnesium in a form that’s most useful for you.
Magnesium taurate doesn’t have any impact on the gut, but does cross the blood brain barriers. It’ll be useful for replenishing central nervous system stores. Magnesium glycinate and magnesium citrate can be useful in terms of if you’ve got chronic constipation. But again, you want to watch what levels you’re using, because if you do too high a dose, you’ll end up with diarrhea. So, we don’t want that happening. But magnesium is essential factor in terms of a healthy immune system. Vitamin D is hands down one of the most important things for healthy immune system. And indeed, there’s studies showing that low vitamin D levels and this is where vitamin D first got its claim to fame was in looking at multiple sclerosis.
And these people who were in the equatorial regions had much less incidents than multiple sclerosis than those of us in Northern hemispheres. Why? Vitamin D levels were correlated with being low. So, taking vitamin D, vitamin D3, and the levels that were told are normal are incorrect. So, we’re told now that 30 nanograms per deciliter is the correct level of vitamin D. No, the correct level of vitamin D for optimal health, instead of just not being sick, is 50 to 80 nanograms per deciliter. And so, getting vitamin D levels measured on a regular basis is extremely important.
Zinc is necessary for a healthy functioning immune system. Zinc picolinate particular helps modulate blood sugar. So, that’s another thing that you want to be taking a look at. So, there’s a lot of different supplements that we use for people on a regular basis. Fish oil is also essential for normal healthy functioning of the immune system, about a gram and a half a day of a good fish oil supplement, EPA DHA.
Dr. Weitz: Have you used any of the SPMS, the fish oil derivatives for resolving inflammation?
Dr. Kaplan: Yes, and they can be highly effective as well. So, yes, those are another legitimate option in order to be able to see reduction of inflammation. Everything is about, “Is it working? Isn’t it working?” Again, it’s a constant back and forth conversation with the patient.
Dr. Weitz: I just want to mention one more condition, which I’ve seen a few patients with and is a fairly perplexing condition to treat, which is POTS, postural orthostatic tachycardia.
Dr. Kaplan: Absolutely. And then we see that in a large percentage of our patients. There’s two major groups of people that you see this development. So, one of those is with Ehlers-Danlos, EDS, hypermobile type. So, Ehlers-Danlos is a connective tissue disorder where they’re stretchy. And if you’ve never been to the circus and you’ve seen the contortionist, that’s an EDS first. Okay? Most people don’t have anything anywhere near that extreme. There are 13 subtypes of EDS. We know the genetics of all of them, except one. That’s Ehlers-Danlos hypermobile. Ehlers-Danlos hypermobile is 85% of the cases of Ehlers-Danlos. Now, easy diagnosis. You can go online. This is a thing called a Beighton scale, B-E-I-G-H-T-O-N scale, and it’ll tell you how flexible you are.
Can you take your thumb, pull it back to your wrist, and get it to touch your wrist without breaking anything? Can you put your hand flat on the table and lift your little finger up to 90 degrees or more? Do you hyperextend your elbows? Do you hyperextend your knees? Can you get your palms flat on the floor without bending your knees? Okay. If you’re scoring nine on that, you’ve got EDSH. So, there’s a spectrum of hypermobility, but because of that, there’s a percentage of those individuals who have pulling that can occur in their pelvic regions from redundancy of pelvic veins and that will cause them POTS.
Now, we didn’t talk about the definition of POTS. POTS is where you go from lying down to standing up and there is a difference in your heart rate. Your blood pressure should stay pretty stable. There’s a difference in your heart rate of 30 if you’re an adult or there’s a difference of 40 if you’re an adolescent. So, the way you test for POTS is cheap way to do it, lie flat on the table for five minutes, check your blood pressure in your pulse. We have them stand up. We recheck blood pressure and pulse without moving around in one minute, three minute, and five minute, just with a regular blood pressure cuff. If you get lightheaded and start to pass out, that’s something we pay attention to obviously, but otherwise, we’re watching to see what happens to your heart rate.
And some of these people skyrocket from 60 lying down to 120, 130 when they go to stand up. And so, the EDS crew is one part of this. Now, the other part where we see it is in these autoimmune people. The nervous system’s a great big place. So, you’ve got the brain. And so, what’s the symptoms of inflammation in the brain? Brain fog, difficulty in focus and concentration, sleep disturbances, headaches, chronic pain, okay. There’s a lot that go on, visual disturbances. But if you specifically damage the autonomic nervous system, the fight or flight, the sympathetic and parasympathetic piece, rest and digest, okay. Parasympathetic, fight or flight, sympathetic. If there’s damage to that, that will give you POTS.
And so, that can be part of the autoimmune picture that we see in people. And so, again, you’ve got to treat that because the POTS drops the blood supply to the brain, which is why you feel faint and lightheaded. And so, that’s an ischemic event. That’s a loss of oxygen, a loss of blood of the brain. So, you’ve got to treat that and you can treat that with fluid loading, salt. Okay. There’s a supplement we use, which is a hypertonic saline solution called ketone water that we can give to our patients, but then you can use compression stockings in order to help them not be symptomatic.
Exercise can be helpful for a percentage of these guys and really toning the musculature and helping keep the blood pressure up so that they don’t lose that. But then medications like beta blockers and there’s also medications that modulate the heart rate. You can also use a steroid that’ll help increase the intravascular volume. So, again, there’s a number of things that can happen, but you have to know how you’re treating POTS, but simple things start simple, right? Fluid load, salt water, and compression stockings, and then of course, being careful going from sitting to standing.
Dr. Weitz: All right. So, I think that’s pretty much all the questions I had prepared. Any final thoughts you want to leave our viewers with?
Dr. Kaplan: So, thank you. The things I want paying attention to is if you have chronic fatigue, if you have chronic pain, if you have post-treatment Lyme syndrome, if you have chronic depression that’s non-responsive to the conventional treatment, chronic anxiety, okay, if you’re a kid with these weird behavioral problems that the parents are tearing their hair out about, you need to think about the problem being an autoimmune disease that’s been caused by an infection. Because if you think about this and we make these diagnosis, you can get better. We can fix you. And so, the book I wrote is a step by step guide to how to do that and I want to put this information in your hands. We have to be doing better and there’s too many people left suffering because we’re not doing good enough. So, Why You’re Still Sick is written for you, for your loved ones, a path forward to recover your health.
Dr. Weitz: Great. And where’s the book available?
Dr. Kaplan: The book will be available on Amazon starting June 14th, its release date, and you can also go to our website at kaplanclinic.com and put in for pre-order. We’ll give you the first chapter of the book for free, and we’ll also give you a booklet on post-COVID syndrome.
Dr. Weitz: Great. And that’s how viewers and listeners can get in touch with you, from the website as well?
Dr. Kaplan: Yes. Kaplan Clinic, K-A-P-L-A-N, clinic.com.
Dr. Weitz: Thank you so much, Gary.
Dr. Kaplan: That has been a complete pleasure. Thank you for having me on the show and thank you for the work you’re doing to inform people and educate them so that they can have better health.
Dr. Weitz: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please go to Apple Podcast and give us a five-star ratings and review. That way, more people will be able to find this Rational Wellness Podcast when they’re searching for health podcasts. And I wanted to let everybody know that I do now have a few openings for new nutritional consultations for patients at my Santa Monica Weitz Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition Clinic. So, if you’re interested, please call my office (310) 395-3111 and sign up for one of the few remaining slots for a comprehensive nutritional consultation with Dr. Ben Weitz. Thank you and see you next week.
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